Symyx Technologies, Inc. is at home in the heart of Silicon Valley.
Prestigious corporations surround the company's impressive buildings,
a far cry from Symyx's early days in borrowed office space. Though
success has led to upgrades in their physical environment, the company's
ultimate goal remains unchanged: to continually optimize and market
a novel approach for the discovery of new industrial materials.
Symyx promises to revolutionize materials discovery by applying
insights learned by researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory.

A NOVEL APPROACH

Creating catalysts, polymers, and electronic materials used to
be costly and laborious. In the conventional approach to materials
discovery, compounds are created one at a time and painstakingly
tested to search for desired qualities. Peter Schultz, formerly
of the Materials Sciences Division at Berkeley Lab, developed a
microscale combinatorial technique to optimize the process of materials
discovery. In Schultz's novel approach, a library with thousands
of different chemical combinations could be rapidly generated, and
each combination processed in parallel to test for desired properties.
This methodology can be used to produce a vast array of industrial
materials, including chemical catalysts, genomic probes, fuel cells,
and battery electrodes.

Schultz's idea was built off the work of Affymax and Affymetrix,
two pharmaceutical companies that apply combinatorial methods in
drug discovery efforts. The term "combinatorial" refers
to a large-scale trial and error technique. For example, in the
human body, the immune system generates millions of antibodies to
identify the specific proteins that will fight any given bacterial
invader. Only a small number of these many antibodies will bind
to the bacteria and multiply, but they will build a powerful source
of immune resistance.

Peter Schultz's new application of the combinatorial model attracted
Alejandro Zaffaroni, the founder of several successful pharmaceutical
companies  including both Affymax and Affymetrix. Symyx Technologies,
Inc. was founded in 1994, with the goal ofcommercializing Schultz's
invention. Symyx arranged a license-for-stock agreement with Berkeley
Lab, the first deal of its kind in any University of California-(UC)
managed lab, and the twelfth in the UC system as a whole. Currently,
Berkeley Lab maintains its shareholder status, but Symyx conducts
its technological pursuits independently of the Lab. Peter Schultz
now heads the Novartis Institute for Functional Genomics and remains
on Symyx's Board of Directors.

ACHIEVING THE IMPOSSIBLE

In comparison to the traditional materials discovery approach,
Symyx's combinatorial method represents a 100-fold increase in efficiency
and a 99% decrease in cost per experiment. Upon defining the desired
properties of a new material, scientists decide which combinations
of elements are most likely to yield these properties. Then, using
automated devices to maximize speed, a library of as many as 10,000
distinct materials can be placed onto a one square-inch surface
area. The library is subjected to varying environmental conditions,
and tests are employed to screen for specific chemical and physical
properties. Through these means, the rate of discovery can be dramatically
accelerated at a fraction of the cost. When combinatorial processes
are put into action, the traditional limitations of materials discovery
are surpassed. Using Berkeley Lab's innovative technique, breakthroughs
previously hailed as impossible can now be achieved.

BUSINESS COLLABORATIONS

Today, Symyx boasts 210 employees in a modern office and laboratory
space. Symyx employs three types of business units: industry collaborations,
proprietary materials, and Discovery Tools. In an industry
collaboration, corporations partner with Symyx in collaborative
research efforts. Symyx technologies are used to discover needed
materials and corporate partners are granted an exclusive license
to commercialize these compounds. For Agfa, a multinational supplier
of imaging products, Symyx has utilized combinatorial chemistry
to develop state-of-the-art phosphors for use in mammography. Additional
collaborations have been established with approximately twenty companies,
including Bayer, Exxon Mobil, and Unilever.

Symyx proprietary materials are candidates for product development
created with combinatorial technology. The first agreement of this
nature was made with Applied Biosystems in January of 2000, involving
polymer compounds that promise to heighten the speed of DNA separation.

Approximately thirteen potential materials are currently in the
works. Discovery Tools, instruments and software developed
at Symyx, are available for sale. Several companies have taken advantage
of these tools, and the number is sure to grow. Dow Chemical Company
is among the current users, having bought a copy of Symyx's Polyolefins
System to use in the lucrative plastics industry.

A SUCCESS TO BE ENVIED

As time passes, more and more corporations are taking advantage
of Symyx's powerful technology. Ciba Specialty Chemicals announced
a research and licensing agreement with Symyx in July of 2000. Ciba
focuses on the development of specialty chemicals that enhance the
functional and aesthetic properties of plastics, lubricants, and
numerous other products. This collaboration with Symyx allows Ciba
to apply the combinatorial chemistry technique to optimize the discovery
of these additives. Symyx's technology will decrease Ciba's costs
and increase the company's success.

More recently, in June of 2001, Sumitomo Chemical Company finalized
an agreement to purchase one of Symyx's Discovery Tools systems.
Sumitomo is a premier chemical manufacturer based in Japan, producing
chemical and pharmaceutical products that are used worldwide. The
purchased Discovery Tools system allows for over ninety-five
experiments to be conducted each day, thereby optimizing the speed
of chemical discovery. Sumitomo expects Symyx's technology to be
a valuable asset in polymer research efforts.

Ciba and Sumitomo are just two of a long list of corporations that
have undergone collaborations with Symyx. Meanwhile, as business
is booming, so is Symyx's technology. To date, Symyx has twenty-five
issued patents, as well as over 240 pending patent applications
in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Over one million compounds
have been screened using the combinatorial process developed by
Schultz and his colleagues at the Berkeley Lab. Symyx's processes,
tools, and materials are of value in the life sciences, chemical,
and electronics industries. Together, these sectors offer over $600
billion in potential end product sales.

Symyx has achieved an astounding level of successa level
of which most startups can only dream. Goldwasser offers some advice
to those considering launching a startup: the founders must "love
the product to the point that, even if [the startup] failed, they
couldn't imagine not doing something with the technology."
In Symyx's case, this dedication has truly paid off.